Philosophical Story Challenge

Good everyone! I apologize for the lateness of this post, but it is Saturday once again and as such it is time for another Philosophical Story Challenge. For this week’s challenge I want us to focus a bit on social groups. I’ve written a lot on personal identity and the philosophical aspects of that, but I want to step forward a bit and look at societal identity and the varying ways that it influences our thinking. It seems to be a theme of history that different groups of people have always created some form of social group divisions. What is, perhaps, even more interesting, is that historically these divisions were generally based on family or belief and pertained to survival. People took care of their own and often fought with people of different groups to protect their land or their resources. Yet, in America today (and really in most all of western culture), we see these same divisions when there appears to be no real need for them. Think of sports teams and alma maters. Why do we create such a fierce, dividing, loyalty to these things? Why do we divide ourselves into social groups when those groups serve no practical purpose? Your challenge this week is to write a story in which there are social groups of a nature similar to sports teams, alma maters, religions, political beliefs, etc. but these social groups exist to fill some tangible, societal need instead of just a desire for societal identity. As always, please keep your stories under 1,000 words if you want to post them on here, but feel free to write more!